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ARPA-E Tech-to-Market Advisors

"As a tech-to-market advisor, every day I get to help prepare teams to move their ground-breaking technical achievements out of the lab and towards real world impact in the energy sector."

James Zahler, Tech-to-Market Advisor

Tech-to-Market (T2M) Advisors are technology development experts with a critical blend of technical, business, and entrepreneurial experience they draw upon to help project teams align their efforts and their technologies towards the needs of their customers or transition partners. T2M Advisors successfully use their leadership, strategy, communication, and management skills to advise technical teams in developing and executing an effective commercialization strategy.

What makes a T2M Advisor successful?

Successful T2M Advisors use their unique skillsets to help create high-impact energy technology development programs and prepare teams and technologies for approaching commercial markets, as well as nurture core skills in business development and technical marketing, product development, supply chains, and financial analysis. T2M Advisors possess excellent coaching and team development skills to guide ARPA E awardees in the creation and execution of technology commercialization strategies.

What do T2M Advisors do?

• Support the development of commercialization pathways for transformational technologies by drawing upon your market and economic analysis, and business development skills and by leveraging your network. T2M Advisors share their unique skill sets and experiences to ensure novel technologies are launched on a commercially relevant arc.

• Actively manage projects teams from project creation through project completion. Through extensive hands-on work in the development and execution of commercialization strategies—strong emphasis on team development, product viability, scale-up pathways, and economic competitiveness—T2M Advisors collaborate with the country’s top technical talent to guide the trajectory of projects towards commercial relevance.

• Build communities by engaging the funding community and managing input from key industry stakeholders and commercialization partners

• Experiment with new ideas—from program structure to funding mechanisms, team selection to Agency strategy—to advance early-stage technology. Additionally, ARPA-E provides a unique venue for thought leadership. We encourage T2M Advisors to develop a technical-market space and shape broader communities.

ARPA-E provides T2M Advisors with:

An environment for the brightest and most passionate team players to advance the next generation of transformational energy technologies. We are driven by the question: “If it works, will it matter?” We realize that for early stage, technical energy breakthroughs to matter, they must ultimately become a commercially viable product. T2M Advisors are responsible for that challenging task: preparing early-stage technologies to one day become market-ready products.